mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

for better or worse. It's a no brainer for Michigan fans to root for Wisconsin, OSU, and PSU to beat NU, just like you should root for any Leaders team to beat any Legends team if your goal is to get to the Rose Bowl or NC game. No more 4-way-or whatever Big Ten Co Champions, that's gone with the wind.

I previously posted on this board that this means Michigan will end up eventually adding a major rival (whoever is your main regular obstacle to winning the division) and/or lessen your rivalry with one of your big three, most likely Notre Dame since OSU in sacrosanct and MSU is both a divisional and instate rival.

I'm NOT being disrepectful to UM traditions, just stating the obvious having lived thru the Big XII and seeing first hand what happens when you go from a conference round robin to divisional play, and losing a high profile rivalry(NU-OU) in the process.

If its any consolation, the old B1G setup was a factor in the co-NC in 1997, not only UM being out of sight, out of mind with no conference championship game, but the B1G not being part of the BCS. That will never happen again when Michigan wins the B1G in the new setup.

This post will probably bring down a rain of negs (hi Cigarro Cubano) but its the truth as this lifelong CFB fan sees it.

OT: got tickets to the NU-Wisconsin game, just shows what a year of constant whining to a Wisconsin brother-in-law can accomplish. Nebraska fans are thrilled to join the B1G and it will be an honor to compete with the Champions of the West every year.

I pretty much agree. Michigan-Nebraska is going to develop into a major rivalry. 10-15 years from now, you'll have undergrads who've been following the series their entire fandom. They won't regard it much differently than the other rivalries. In a sense this is what happened with the ND series. Although it began over a century ago, it went through a monster hiatus (only two meetings from 1910-1977), so it was practically a new rivalry when it resumed in 1978. Within a few years it was considered a traditional September matchup. A lot of people are surprised to learn that we've only played ND around 35-40 times altogether.

on this board. My point isn't who should be the 1997 NC, but that the new setup will help "prevent" such atrocities from recurring, even if it changes some of your traditional rivalries :)

Even B1G people like Joe Paterno acknowledged the lack of a conference title game hurt, as the conference champion disappeared from the national spotlight until the bowl game. It wasn't just extra TV money that drove the decision to go the divisional route.

I'm not old enough to remember anything about polls in 1997, but the better example on this board would probably be 2006. M/OSU would have faced off during conference championship week, again with a MNC berth on the line. Instead we got to watch from the sidelines and hope for a miracle that came tantalizingly close to coming true but didn't. With the new setup, things could have/ would have happened very differently.

I don't know how conference championships had anything to do with 1997. Michigan was ranked number one in the AP poll from the Monday after PSU, and had the top spot in the Coaches Poll after OSU. How would a conference championship have helped Michigan in 1997? It came down to Michigan being ranked third on one ballot in the coaches poll after bowl season.

In 2006 I can certainly understand where a conference title game would help, because we needed a rematch and a #3 beating #1 would definitely mean a spot in the BCS title game, but I don't see how it could have helped in 1997, as we were already ranked number one in the AP and Coaches Polls going into the Rose Bowl.

When you're ranked ahead of someone, you don't need a miracle to stay in front of them, or even for them to lose. You just don't need 6 hours of campaigning between CBS and certain coaches. So I don't see how we needed a miracle to stay in front of Florida. We did need one for USC to lose to a greatly inferior team. So Florida got a miracle (though a minor one).